TWYLA HANSEN is the State Poet of Nebraska. Her
newest book, Dirt Songs: A Plains Duet (Backwaters Press 2011) with rancher-writer Linda Hasselstrom, won the 2012 Nebraska Book Award in poetry, and was Finalist for the Willa Literary Award and High Plains Book Award. She has five previous books, including Potato Soup, which won a 2004 Nebraska Book Award. Her poems were nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Prairie Fire newspaper, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Ascent, Natural Bridge, Organization & Environment, Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry (Backwaters Press 2007), Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), Poets Against the War (Nation Books, 2003), and A Contemporary Reader for Creative Writing (Harcourt Brace, 1994). Her BS and MAg are from the University of Nebraska — Lincoln. She was raised in northeast Nebraska on land her grandparents farmed in the late 1800s as immigrants from Denmark. She is a creative writing presenter through the Nebraska Humanities Council, and lives and works in Lincoln, where her wooded acre is maintained as an urban wildlife habitat, recognized by the 1994 Mayor’s Landscape Conservation Award.